True History of the Kelly Gang isn't merely a historical novel; it's a fully imagined act of historical impersonation … The form and style of the novel could hardly be more striking. Couched as a rough-hewn apologia drawn from 13 parcels of dogeared papers Kelly has written while on the run, True History is dedicated to the infant daughter he has yet to see and, he promises, contains 'no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false' … One's own eyes widen a little as this strange narrative unfolds in a prose that seems initially to be as untidy and agrammatical as subway graffiti. As we adjust to the raggedly punctuated flow, however, Kelly's voice develops into an expansive and malleable instrument, bristling with shafts of wit and poetic grace notes.
In a spectacular feat of literary ventriloquism, the Australian-born novelist Peter Carey invites the outlaw Ned Kelly to tell his story. He summons the rollicking, unschooled, hugely colorful voice of Australia's best-known underdog for a bravura book-length performance … In providing Ned's side of the various skirmishes that form the basis of his notoriety, and in drawing upon a post-bank-robbery 8,300-word public statement of Kelly's for some of the book's lively syntax, Mr. Carey delves into the relative minutiae of police and journalistic accounts of Ned's life. These particulars might threaten to eclipse the bigger picture if they were not rendered so atmospherically, complete with wombats and banshees, cockatoo pie and roasting kangaroo.
Pushed centre stage with neither a definite nor an indefinite article for moral or theatrical support, True History of the Kelly Gang signals the first of its many deceits. Peter Carey's skills, passions and obsessions are all fully on display in this long-awaited take on colonial Australia's most enduring myth … This Ned Kelly is a convincing and intriguing individual; Carey has indulged his appetite for language and imaginative construction in making him so. It does not matter that we are unable to pin Kelly to the facts of his life, only that we are willing and prepared to accept him as Carey reveals him to us, and to trust the kaleidoscopic array of characters and situations and the often startling images employed by Carey to create them. There is wonder here, and awe.
Trying hard to live a good life, Ned, like our best tragedians, is forced by the law–in the form of the Protestant English overseers–to turn to a life of crime. In the course of a story of wombat holes and kangaroo roasts, of men dressed as women and girls hard as men, of bar fights and Banshees and babies whose eyes change color, Ned fights for the rights of his oppressed co-religionists, the Irish poor with more babies than rats and fewer rights than water. He writes his story on the run from the law in the last weeks of his life, with no time for commas or periods, desperate to narrate the true story to a daughter he will never see. But more important, Ned wants the larger audience, the Australian people, to learn the truth about his persecuted people.
The peculiar style Carey uses to re-create Ned’s voice is crude without the sacrifice of eloquence; it comes across as the heartfelt expression of an intelligent, reflective but indifferently educated man … ‘I wished only to be a citizen,’ writes Ned, and the bulk of the book consists of how circumstances drove him inexorably toward bushranging despite his preference for the quiet life of a farmer … True History feels raw, passionate and unqualified, and yet it’s also surprisingly free of romanticism. Perhaps that’s because Carey’s describing a man who tried to be a rugged individualist, only to find his final glory in the embrace of the class that he ultimately found inescapable. This novel is a cry out against a history of crushing injustice.
Who is more trustworthy in telling a history: a murderer and thief (likely to burn in hell anyway) writing to the daughter he will never know, or the historians and novelists profiting from his life and death decades later? Such questions rise out of the text even as Carey succeeds in creating an account that not only feels authentic but also passes as a serious novel and solid, old-fashioned ‘entertainment’ … What keeps True History of the Kelly Gang moving along is the wonderfully poetic, kinetic voice that Carey has fashioned for his illiterate hero … This is ultimately not so much a portrait of its own narrator as it is a gallery of the people and circumstances who made him. True History of the Kelly Gang is a big, meaty novel, blending equal parts Dickens and Cormac McCarthy with a distinctly Australian strain of melancholy.
With this remarkable novel, Carey has raised a national legend to the level of an international myth. If the world thinks of America through the voice of Huck Finn, from now on they'll think of Australia through the testimony of Ned Kelly … Ned's good nature isn't enough to spare him from the assaults of English injustice. At school, he endures a barrage of dispiriting prejudice. The police harass his family relentlessly. ‘All my life all I wanted were a home,’ he sighs, but the authorities are determined to catch his relations stealing or lying or fighting or drinking – anything to put one of them away in the ‘gaol’ and encourage the remaining clan to move out … In this bracing narrative, Carey has given Kelly back his tongue with a style that rips like a falling tree. The Australia-born author is something of a genius in these acts of literary ventriloquism.
Written as a memoir from Kelly to the daughter he never met, True History envisions untamed 19th-century Australia in a manner reminiscent of the revisionist American Westerns of the '60s and '70s: as a harsh, uncompromising land where the rudiments of civilization barely mask, and frequently enable, a barely hidden savagery. If anything, Carey exceeds the Westerns. Kelly's early years are occupied with a half-Freudian, half-Darwinian fight for survival … Carey takes a while to get to Kelly's life of crime, which serves his story well. Not only does this leave him time to develop his protagonist—a coarse but generous man whose rough circumstances have yet to erase his youthful naiveté—but it also emphasizes the briefness of the Kelly Gang's exploits and the media's importance in creating the Kelly myth.
Ned’s first-person narrative is addressed to the daughter he’s never seen (her pregnant mother fled to America rather than witness his inevitable death) in run-on prose that faultlessly reproduces the speech rhythms of the uneducated without becoming distracting. Describing his youth, Kelly claims the early charges against him were largely fabricated by vengeful police with a grudge against his mother’s family … Our naive hero thinks he can get his mother out of jail by addressing long, self-justifying letters to the authorities. Not a chance, of course, but there’s a rough, poetic grandeur to Ned’s belief.
No reader will be left unmoved by this dramatic tale of an instinctively good-hearted young man whose destiny, in Carey's revisionist point of view, was determined by heredity on one side and official bigotry and corruption on the other; whose criminal deeds were motivated by gallantry and desperation; and whose exploits in eluding the police for almost two years transfixed a nation and made him a popular hero. The unschooled Kelly narrates through a series of letters he writes to the baby daughter he will never see … This is in essence an adventure saga, with numerous descriptions of the wild and forbidding Australian landscape, shocking surprises, coldhearted villains who hail from the top and the bottom of the social ladder and a tender love story.
